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MEETING OF FRONTIERS ADDS COLLECTIONS FROM
THE UNITED STATES, RUSSIA, AND GERMANY
The Meeting of Frontiers web site of the Library of Congress has added
collections from the Library of Congress, the State and University Library
(SUB)
of Lower Saxony, Göttingen, Germany, the National Library of Russia (NLR), and
the Russian State Library (RSL). This is the sixth upgrade and expansion of the
site since its launch in December 1999.
Meeting of Frontiers is a bilingual, multimedia English-Russian digital
library that tells the story of the American exploration and settlement of the
West and the parallel exploration and settlement of Siberia and the Russian
Far East. With the latest additions, the site now includes over 330,000 digital
images that are available for use in schools and libraries and by the general
public. Meeting of Frontiers is the world’s largest bilingual collaborative
library site.
Library of Congress collections added include the Kiowa Stories from the
papers of Hugh Lenox Scott (Manuscript Division) and the Eleanor L. Pray Album
(Prints and Photographs Division). Scott was a West Point graduate and career
military officer who served at various western posts between 1876 and 1897.
In 1892, he was assigned to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and given command of Troop L
of the 7th Cavalry, an all-Indian unit comprised of Kiowa, Comanche, and
Apache.
During his years in the West, Scott developed an increasing interest in the
region’s indigenous populations and became an astute practitioner of Plains
Indian sign language – non-verbal method of communicating with hand
gestures –-
that he used to gather information about Native American cultures. The
selections
from the Scott papers included in Meeting of Frontiers consist of Kiowa stories
that he collected while stationed at Fort Sill.
The Eleanor L. Pray Album features images from Vladivostok in 1899-1901
and the life of an American merchant family living in the city at that time. It
was created by Eleanor Roxanna Lord Pray (1868-1954), an American woman who
lived in Vladivostok for thirty-six years (1894-1930). The album eventually was
inherited by Mrs. Pray’s granddaughter, Patricia D. Silver, who in 2002 donated
it to the Library of Congress for scholarly use and digitization on the Meeting
of Frontiers web site. The album offers a unique and private perspective on
Russian and expatriate life at a crucial time in late-tsarist Russia. Among
the expatriates pictured in the album is Richard T. Greener, the U.S.
commercial
agent in the city at that time who was also the first African-American graduate
of Harvard College.
The latest Meeting of Frontiers update also includes, from the State
and University Library of Göttingen, a large portion of this institution’s
world-famous Asch Collection. The creation of Georg Thomas von Asch
(1729-1807),
a German who studied medicine at Göttingen and then entered the Russian
National
Service, the collection is a comprehensive record of Russian expeditions to
Siberia in the second half of the eighteenthcentury. It includes books,
manuscripts, and maps, as well as medals, minerals, plants, clothes, and other
items of scientific interest that Asch gathered while serving as an official of
the Russian government. Asch donated the collection to Göttingen, where it
became the core of the library’s extensive Russian collections. The
digitization
of 246 rare books for Meeting of Frontiers was funded by a grant to the SUB by
the German Society for Research.
Project partners since 1999, the Russian State Library and the National
Library of Russia contributed rare books, maps, and manuscripts to their
already
extensive collections of digitized materials on the Meeting of Frontiers site.
The additions include unpublished memoirs of Russian exiles in Siberia, Russian
documentation about the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, and the 1837
translation
into Aleut of the Russian catechism by Ioann Veniaminov (St. Innocent).
Meeting of Frontiers is funded by the U.S. Congress. Significant in-kind
contributions to the project have been made by the Open Society
Institute-Russia,
Yukos Oil and the Foundation for Internet Education, and the SUB. Project
partners
include the Library of Congress, the Russian State Library, the National
Library
of Russia, the SUB, the Rasmuson Library of the University of Alaska Fairbanks,
the Institute of the North at Alaska Pacific University, Anchorage, and several
dozen regional libraries, archives, and historical societies in Siberia and the
Russian Far East.
Meeting of Frontiers is part of the Library’s Global Gateway initiative
to create digital partnerships between the Library of Congress and leading
libraries around the world. Meeting of Frontiers can be seen at
<http://frontiers.loc.gov>. Please direct questions to <[log in to unmask]>.
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